Women of Their Times By Anna Galstuck

Description

Women of Their Times by Anna Galstuck

The memoir of by my grandmother, combines her life experiences with stories told to her by her mother, grandmother, and older sisters to create a series of vignettes that stretch from a small city in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire (today in independent Ukraine) in the early 1860s to New York City in the years before World War I. The harsh conditions of life and oppression of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe that Anna records are well documented. A major part of her story is how those conditions compelled her mother, Mirele, to leave her family in 1908. She travelled by herself, an unaccompanied married woman, by horse and cart, train, and steamship to come to New York City. There she became a garment sewer and labored to raise the money so her children, mother, and husband could join her. Anna tells how Mirele, inspired to fight against the horrible working conditions she and her coworkers faced, helped lead a strike for union recognition in the factory.